Afghan Archivist of Culture

A brightly colored fresco lines the halls of an old temple, depicting images of a thriving culture. A museum with an impressive modern art collection attracts tourists from all over the world.

This was Afghanistan 25 years ago.

"At that time, it was a beautiful country filled with lush flowers," said Solaimon Olumee, an Afghan-American painter. "Women weren't covered. National Geographic called it a 'great vacation spot.'"

But because the majority of Afghanistan's intellectual and artistic community has left, the country's cultural history is on the verge of extinction.

Farhad Azad is hoping to bring it back. With his website, he wants to archive what he believes to be a vital piece of Afghanistan's history.

"There was a lack of information or coverage of contemporary and ancient arts and the humanities in the Afghan media and mainstream media as well," Azad said. "I grew up in America, but it was hard to find anything about Afghanistan other than the Soviet occupation or the civil war."

He hopes to change that by "promoting and raising awareness to the arts, culture and history of the Afghan people. Through the humanities, we hope to build a bridge between the West and Afghanistan."

The website includes images of contemporary and historical Afghan artists, stories about Afghanistan, and Afghan music, fiction and poetry. Azad compiled his work through networking and reporting. While he makes no money off of his website, he has since left his job in the technology sector to devote all of his time to building and maintaining the site.

Afghanmagazine.com details the demise of cultural centers in Afghanistan.

"Herat is a city in Western Afghanistan that had gone through a renaissance right before the Soviet invasion," Azad said. "You can still sense the beauty of the city, but most of the cultural heritage has been destroyed."

The Afghan National Museum and the National Contemporary Art Gallery in Kabul have been looted, while any remaining artwork has also been demolished. In fact, most Afghan art is now unaccounted for due to archival destruction.

"In 1996, in order to keep the rebels warm, the entire card catalog archiving the art at the Afghan National Museum was burned," Azad said.

Geographic location made Afghanistan the epicenter for the arts and gave it worldwide importance. Within one valley in Afghanistan, rare Greek coins were found, Buddhist statues were erected and pottery depicting deities from Islam, Judaism and Christianity were unearthed, Azad said.

Afghanistan was immensely rich in the arts from prehistory to the 17th century, according to Thomas Leisten, an assistant professor of Islamic art and architectural history at Princeton University. Gold was discovered from the first century, while Greek temples were built when Afghanistan was ruled by the successors of Alexander the Great.

"The art of Afghanistan is not Afghan in the sense of a national art," Leisten wrote in an e-mail. "For most of its history, the cities in western Afghanistan belonged culturally and for times historically to eastern Iran."

That may explain why international art historians have not been more vocal in preserving Afghanistan's culture. They're not sure where the art belongs.

Furthermore, the Afghan Service of Antiquities, an organization that sold Afghan art to other countries, had a terrible reputation for selling art and antiques at wholesale prices to dealers in Europe and the United States.

The Taliban's role in the destruction of art in Afghanistan has been widely documented. Earlier this year, Buddhist statues imbedded in the mountains were blown up because of the Taliban's extreme religious beliefs prohibiting Muslims from viewing any cultural artifacts depicting religions other than their own.

"As for Buddhist and Hindu monuments, it may be connected to a saying of the Prophet Muhammad who ordered (other religious) idols to be destroyed when he cleansed the Kaaba in Mecca," Leisten wrote. "While Muslim rulers and regimes over centuries had apparently no problem with the existence of the Buddhas, the Taliban are taking a deliberately fundamentalist course concerning pre-Islamic antiquities."

Other Afghan Americans are taking an active role in responding to the destruction.

Amanullah Haiderzad, an Afghan sculptor who established the fine arts department at Kabul University, is trying to establish an Afghan-American art and cultural museum in New York City. But he said raising funds for the project is difficult because Afghans are generally not wealthy, and have only recently immigrated to the United States.

"My goal is to bring cultural and historical pride to the new generation of Afghan-Americans," he said. "Right now, we have nothing. This center would not only help to understand our heritage, but to get to know each other now."

Although the media still portrays Afghanistan as a barren, poverty-stricken country with no infrastructure, Azad said there is still a slight cultural presence in the country.

"A reporter recently went to the refugee camps there, and some of the masters were still painting," he said. "They were keeping the art alive."